Flukeman

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Flukeman

Flukeman was a villain from The X Files TV show. He only phisically appeard in an episode called the host while he was only referenced during the rest of the series. He was played by Glen Morgan.

Depiction

The Flukeman – a form of quasi-vertebrate human – was an example of reproductive and physiological cross-traiting due to radiation, abnormal cell fusion and/or the suppression of natural genetic processes; essentially, the creature was a result of human science rather than nature. Its vestigial features seemed parasitic but it also had primate physiology.

The Flukeman transmitted its larvae, a form of flatworm, through its bite. The being searched for hosts, in order to multiply, and would attack because its victims' bodies provided generative nourishment.
A photograph of a wound from an encounter with the Flukeman.

Typically, a survivor of a bite by the Flukeman would be infected with a flatworm that the victim would cough up, at a later point. The wound pattern from the Flukeman's bite looks similar to scolex attachment but is much larger.

There is evidence to suggest that a bite by the Flukeman might result in a survivor subsequently experiencing a peculiar, unfavorable taste in their mouth that would be difficult to remove, although not be accompanied by a difficulty with swallowing. In the one recorded case of a Flukeman bite-victim experiencing such an unpleasant taste, the victim had also swallowed a mouthful of sewage, at the time of the attack. It is therefore unknown whether the Flukeman or the sewage was to blame for the unfavorable taste.

Like other fluke or flatworms, the Flukeman had no sex organs and was genderless but was, even though technically human, capable of spontaneous regeneration.

The Flukeman's typical environment was underwater, although it could also survive on land, in Earth's normal atmospheric levels. The being was also strong enough to haul its victims underwater with it.

History

The Flukeman originated on a decommissioned Russian freighter that was used in the disposal of salvage material from the meltdown at Chernobyl. The creature was thus born in a primordial soup of radioactive sewage. In the Atlantic Ocean, two miles off the coast of New Jersey, the Flukeman caused a blockage in the freighter's boiler system. The being then attacked a young engineer named Dmitri who had been sent to clear the blockage, dragging him down into murky water inside one of the freighter's sewage tanks despite the efforts of his crewmates to keep him grounded. When the crew members flushed the tanks, the Flukeman was washed out to sea, along with Dmitri's body. This incident was later reported in the National Comet, in which the creature was referred to - in an article titled "Monster On Board?!" - as a "modern day sea monster, a bloodthirsty creature from beneath the waves."

It was following this incident that the being first entered the New Jersey sewage system. The Flukeman was subsequently believed to have entered the system via an old overflow system that dumped sewage into the harbor during heavy rainfall.

One morning, immediately after a workman removed a large piece of wood from the mesh over a sewer outflow and put it on a walkway above the sewage water, the Flukeman pulled the man backwards, while remaining underwater itself, and dragged him towards the mesh, biting into his back soon thereafter. The workman escaped, however, with help from a fellow workman, who threw him a rope and hauled him out of the water. He was left to assume that a snake had bitten him but he later died in the privacy of his own home.

The Flukeman becomes caught in a large, transparent pipe.

The Flukeman then entered the Newark County Sewage Processing Plant, where it was seen by a worker named Charlie as it swam through one of the facility's many filtration pools. Due to the alarmed Charlie subsequently backflushing the facility's sewage system, the Flukeman was caught in a large transparent pipe. The being was viewed, therein, by not only Charlie but also the plant's foreman and FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder (who had been investigating the Flukeman's past two attacks, after Dmitri's deceased body had been discovered in a sewer).

The Flukeman was then taken to the Middlesex County Psychiatric Hospital, where it was confined to a room and hid behind some pipes in a far corner when Mulder and his former FBI partner, Dana Scully, visited the facility. Even though Scully (who, with Mulder, looked into the room through a window while standing in a corridor outside) did not immediately see the being, Mulder pointed it out to her and she was amazed by the Flukeman's appearance. Mulder described the creature as, seemingly, a "giant blood-sucking worm", having used this description once before - when he had commented to Scully that he hoped he would not have to report that such a being was the culprit behind the recent attacks.

Soon thereafter, Mulder's FBI superior, Assistant Director Walter Skinner had a conversation with the Federal Prosecutor's Office about how to prosecute the suspect and learned that the Justice Department had asked for the suspect to be transfered to an institution for a full psychiatric evaluation. Despite Mulder warning that the being should not be transferred there as it was not a man but "a monster", Skinner was at a loss for what else to do – believing that the Flukeman should not be put in a zoo due to having killed two people – and reluctantly admitted to the bizarreness of the killer, ultimately agreeing with Mulder that the case should have been an X-file even though that unit had recently been closed.
An attempt to transport the Flukeman was then begun by the US Marshal Service; the being was loaded - while strapped to a gurney - into the back of a US Marshal's ambulance, known as vehicle forty-nine forty, that drove it away. Mid-journey, the Flukeman escaped from the gurney, however, and the marshal driving the vehicle - the ambulance's only other occupant - discovered this but continued to drive (calling for immediate assistance and backup), until stopping near a sign for Lake Betty. Even though he armed himself with a shotgun and then carefully conducted a visual search of the ambulance's rear compartment in which he found no trace of the being (except for a gooey residue on the straps that had held the prisoner down), the Flukeman then attacked and killed the driver, who screamed in horror and let off a shot from his weapon.

The being subsequently crawled inside one of two portable chemical toilets that were located in Lake Betty Park. In this cubicle, the Flukeman took up a waiting position inside the toilet itself. At 5:07 early the next morning, the being was picked up by a tanker truck, initially causing a blockage in the tube that sucked the toilet's contents into the truck. By 6:37 a.m., the truck - now containing the Flukeman - was traveling away from Lake Betty Park, as Mulder arrived to investigate the death of the marshal who had driven the being there. Although the search effort in the area was extensive and Mulder struggled to find the being, the Flukeman eluded detection until something undetermined was spotted by a linesman in a section of pipe that was near the place where Dmitri's body had been found and was part of the old overflow system where the being was thought to have entered the sewage system; Mulder concluded that the Flukeman was "working its way back out to sea."

Agent Mulder and the foreman of the treatment plant headed to this sewer, and into the vault alone. The foreman attempted the difficult task of closing a rusted gate between the vault and its overflow pipe, which led to a similar vault before the system traveled three-quarters of a mile to the sea. After the foreman fell in the sewage water while trying to shut the gate, the Flukeman dragged him underwater, avoiding Mulder subsequently shooting at it by remaining in the water, and prevented the foreman from being pulled out of the water by Mulder when the foreman resurfaced, dragging him back underneath. After the foreman resurfaced again and Mulder helped him to safety, the Flukeman tried to clamber into the overflow pipe but was prevented from doing so by Mulder, who desperately managed to finally close the rusty gate, severing the being in half. The Flukeman wailed a long, high-pitched scream and the lower portion of its body, including its legs, was left floating in the slightly bloodied sewage water inside the vault. At night soon thereafter, the top section of the Flukeman's body awakened while floating in the sewage of Newark. (TXF: "The Host")
Flukeman, featured on the cover of the World Weekly Informer.

In early 1996, an issue of World Weekly Informer was published with a headline on its front page reading, "He's Back!" The article's subheading read, "Flukeman washed up in Martha's Vineyard" and an artist's drawing of the Flukeman was presented above the article. (TXF: "Pusher")

Later that year, Scully told Mulder that, except for the Flukeman case, she wouldn't change a day of the past four years in which they had been working together. (TXF: "The Field Where I Died").